“If readers come to believe that the value of a new book is $10, publishing as we know it is over,” said David Gernert, Mr. Grisham’s literary agent. “If you can buy Stephen King’s new novel or John Grisham’s ‘Ford County’ for $10, why would you buy a brilliant first novel for $25? I think we underestimate the effect to which extremely discounted best sellers take the consumer’s attention away from emerging writers.”
“You have a choke point where millions of writers are trying to reach millions of readers,” Mr. Petrocelli said, “but if it all has to go through a narrow funnel where there are only four or five buyers deciding what’s going to get published, the business is in trouble.”
Marvell and E Ink team up to improve e-readers. Their new integrated processor will reduce the screen refresh rate from three seconds to less than one second and will eliminate the "blackout" effect with page turns.
Two new e-book readers: The PocketBook 301 and the PocketBook 360. Both support six languages, have built in Sudoku, chess, sea battle, and solitaire games as well as a picture viewer with a slideshow function, a clock, and calendar. Users can also change the font size or make notes.
Condé Nast and Adobe are building a digital version of Wired magazine for electronic reading devices, as publishers struggle to render magazines on e-readers." />
Owners of new Amazon Kindles are about to get two improvements to their e-readers. They won't have to do anything; indeed, they might not even notice the upgrade.
"The Sony Reader, priced from $180 to $300, will probably be offered with hardware and software improvements in August, Phil Lubell, vice president of digital reading at Sony Electronics, said yesterday in an interview in San Francisco."
Cathedral Rock Publishing's new "Book IS the Store" application is gaining traction with book publishers and authors looking to continue communicating with existing readers and make them aware of compatible products and services. The company is currently in talks with a well known rock and roll musician who is looking to reintroduce his substantial catalog to a new MultiMedia eBook generation.
The international print editions of The Guardian and The Observer are among the earliest casualties of the Guardian News & Media's (GNM) evolving "digital first" strategy. International copies, printed in New York, Frankfurt, Madrid, Malta and Cyprus, will cease printing October 1, GNM announced Friday.